Male Call

“Leaves of Grass,” “City Island,” and “The Bounty Hunter.”

Edward Norton, playing a double role as twin brothers, with Richard Dreyfuss.Credit VICTOR MELAMED

Edward Norton is a good actor and a busy man—a citizen who concerns himself with solar energy, affordable housing, the Maasai wilderness, peace in the Middle East, the High Line, the fate of the Mets’ outfield, and heaven knows what else. But he’s not quite a movie star, or the actor he could be. Early on, after a fast, Oscar-nominated start as an altar boy accused of murdering a priest in “Primal Fear” (1996), Norton played cunning lowlifes in tough little pictures. He was brilliant as Lester (Worm) Murphy, a reckless gambler and nihilist, in “Rounders” (1998), and then, muscling up, he turned Derek Vinyard, the swastikaed skinhead in “American History X” (also 1998), into a horrifyingly intelligent native fascist. Norton has blue eyes, a long, narrow chin, and an ironic smile that can suddenly turn intimate. He can be retiring and nearly bodiless, falling back from confrontation like a ghost; he can also be menacing and cold, hardening his baritone into a snarl. Like James Woods in films thirty years ago, he appears to think that he’s the smartest person in the room, and, like Woods, he uses that arrogance as a way of exposing the madness of egotistical characters. At the moment, movies could use more men like Norton—actors who can spread a little acid or a little light. If such high-domed performers develop an ingratiating way with women, they become stars, like George Clooney; if not, they usually subside into character roles, like Woods or Alec Baldwin. It’s not easy to be the smartest guy in the room.

Norton, I think, has the charm, the courage, and the dimensions to take on great parts, but his career has wandered around in roles that have been off center without being good. He stood up to Brad Pitt’s bullying in the nutty cult classic “Fight Club” (1999). He was the scientist with anger-management issues in “The Incredible Hulk” (2008), the kind of popping-veins extravaganza every actor should gratefully leave to Jim Carrey. He was swanky in cravats, high collars, and an Anglo-Austrian accent in that thick wedge of Hapsburg cheesecake “The Illusionist” (2006). The accent got even more pinched and refined when he played a British doctor suppressing his personal sorrows and martyring himself to Chinese epidemics in “The Painted Veil” (2006), a frightfully noble picture that could have been made by M-G-M in 1940. These are not the best choices for an actor with an instinct for contemporary life. Action is apparently not to Norton’s taste, but he’s a natural for calculating power types and intellectuals—gangsters, lawyers, politicians, journalists, corporate and financial operators. He needs to find writers who will create roles for him as intelligent, troubled men, as Clooney has.

In “Leaves of Grass,” Norton gets a real workout in a goosey, half-serious, half-comical mess. He’s Bill Kincaid, a mesmerizing classical-philosophy professor at Brown. He’s also Bill’s identical twin, Brady, an Oklahoma pot grower with truck-stop manners and a peculiar drawl (peculiar because it runs at double tempo). Brady is everything that Bill left behind in his ascent to the Ivy League. Citing Socrates, Bill tells his class that the Greeks knew that passion was “mercilessly human,” that a serene life was an illusion. Yet he’s a becalmed man himself—another asexual, dried-up movie professor without a touch of spontaneity. As he considers an offer from Harvard (the film drops all the right names), he hears that Brady has been killed. This is a ruse, it turns out, to lure him back to Oklahoma, where he gets pulled into his brother’s convoluted plot to take on the drug kingpin of the Southwest (Richard Dreyfuss). As Bill, Norton wears his hair short, his sweaters sleeveless, and his slacks gray; his style is academic casual. When he plays Brady, his hair is long and stringy; he’s loose-limbed and slack-jawed, and he can’t stop chattering. The surprise of the movie is that Brady the pot grower is just as smart as Bill the professor, and a lot happier. He cultivates dope in mineral-water solutions—he’s a hydroponic felon—and his weed packs a wallop. Norton gives himself to this reprobate without condescension. He turns Brady into a warmhearted, enraging, but lovable screwup.

Norton has played double before—the nice boy in “Primal Fear” had a vicious side—but never in such a literal way. To adopt the movie’s classical terminology, the Apollonian and the Dionysian temperaments are digitally joined in an agon. Tim Blake Nelson, who wrote and directed “Leaves of Grass,” combines the two Nortons in ways that look natural enough. They argue, talking over each other’s words, horse around, and fight. The movie is a showcase for digital technology and for Norton’s virtuosity, but I wish it weren’t such a weightless shambles. Nelson can’t seem to find the right tone; he veers from backwoods comedy to nervously unhinged violence to earnest talk of poetry and the meaning of life. Born Jewish in Tulsa (his maternal grandparents escaped the Nazis), Nelson has some heavy fun with his community. He makes Dreyfuss’s drug lord (who fronts as a businessman) a fierce Jewish supporter of Israel—his office walls are lined with pictures of Menachem Begin and other Israeli leaders. And Nelson throws in a foolish Jewish orthodontist (Josh Pais), who tries to blackmail both brothers, and accidentally kills someone. There’s no reason that Jews shouldn’t be treated as comically as anyone else in the movies, but the scenes are so crudely directed that they’re more embarrassing than funny. Recitations of Walt Whitman and a few encounters with a lovely teacher and poet (Keri Russell) begin to quicken the professor, but the movie, for all its high-culture flourishes, feels stale. The mix of cornpone shenanigans and intellectualism lands Nelson in Coen Brothers territory, and I never thought that I’d miss their brutally mocking tone so much. Edward Norton needs to put himself not only in the hands of a good writer but of a good director, too.

After brilliant early performances as a sardonic tough in “8 Million Ways to Die” (1986) and “Godfather III” (1990), Andy Garcia also ran into the rough. “City Island,” an amiable family comedy one step above a TV sitcom (and several steps below “Moonstruck”), won’t put him back on the main road, but he tries some new things in it, and it’s fun to watch him work. Garcia is Vince Rizzo, the stressed paterfamilias of an Italian-American clan living in the Bronx boating community, a family in which everyone has a secret and mistrusts everyone else. (The story is kept going by the inability of any character to say even six words of truth in a row.) Vince is a prison guard whose secret is that he wants to perform: at night, he sneaks off to an acting class. In one scene, the instructor, played by Alan Arkin, delivers a hilarious diatribe against “the pause”—the endlessly prolonged reflective grimace that Marlon Brando introduced into American acting. Speak or listen, the teacher says. Don’t pause. The family’s screaming fights may be glibly contrived (no pausing there), but the miseries of an aspiring actor’s life feel genuine. Vince auditions for a Scorsese movie, and, as he is interviewed by a female casting director perched on a platform, he painfully casts away every acting mannerism until he speaks in his own voice. Vince comes to life, and for that moment Garcia regains the energy he had as a young actor. If Norton and Garcia are good actors whose careers got lost, Gerard Butler (“300”) is a brutish actor whose career should be confined to playing sword-bearing Spartans and perhaps wrestlers in the netherworld of cable. I want to meet the agent who sold Butler to the studios as a romantic-comedy star. (He was also in “The Ugly Truth.”) In “The Bounty Hunter,” Butler’s dark hair droops over his forehead, and he looks like a cross between Cro-Magnon man and Moe from the Three Stooges. Butler is Scottish, and you can see him trying to form American-sounding phrases with his lips, but the voice comes out coarse-grained and weirdly nondescript, as if produced by a badly programmed computer. His bounty hunter, once a great cop, takes on the job of reeling in his ex-wife, a hustling New York crime reporter on the lam, played by Jennifer Aniston, in heels and skintight dresses. The queen of all celebrity magazines is still adorable, and she has just enough technique—a mouth twisted in disbelief, a furrowed brow—to get by as a comedienne. The movie is an example of the once sublime genre known as “the comedy of re-marriage.” That is, as the couple are tearing each other apart we’re meant to root for them to get back together. The only thing that Butler and Aniston have in common, however, is identical Aruba-bronze skin tones: they seem to have been sprayed with the same can. Even considered as no more than an assembly-line Hollywood product, “The Bounty Hunter” falls well below factory standards. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.